Skiing in Pictures

So I went to Hakuba a while ago for some snowboarding.  We went for the weekend, arriving early Saturday morning and staying overnight.  The hotel was, like all Japanese hotels in the mountains, old and grubby, but the town was pretty nice.  It was obviously styled after a european town, but no one managed to get to europe before they did so.  Everything looks like a disney town from the 70's, plastic and glass fibre which is kind of weird, but also fun.

The skiing was okay, but the snow was terrible.

It started raining on the Saturday night and didn't stop on Sunday, so we decided to abort the Sunday skiing and check out the town.

There were a few quite interesting places to visit in the town, including a place to make some glassy stuff (pictures at some point later) that we did.  Walking around with the clouds and the mountains gives a pretty cool (haha!) effect whenever the sun comes out, in that the roads heat up and create great swathes of mist, which form fog, which cool the place back down, which clears the fog, which then let's the sun through and so on.  It happened a few times while we were walking around and enabled a couple of these pictures where everything seems foggy and mysterious.

It was difficult to tell when it was going to stop raining, so when it did we ran around taking pictures and trying not to step in the lakes that had formed about the place.

I'm not sure whether I like this picture, but it has a light and a dark half which is kind of cool.

My favourite snow based machine.  These are everywhere as you might imagine.

See how filthy that snow is?  That's because they hadn't had snow in weeks by the time we got there.  The conditions were downright bad for skiing.  It snowed the day after we left.

SkiBoarding

So last weekend I went snowboarding for the first time in a long while.  It turns out that it's like riding a bike, you really can just jump back in and do it again.  There's a ton more technique in boarding though, so I wasn't quite as good as before - I think I've hit my ceiling with regards to snow based sports.

Disregarding ability, fun was had.  The Tsugaike place we went to was somewhat easy - there were only a couple of areas worth a red, and the black was only black because of the intense moguls.  Not that big lumpy blocks aren't worth a black mark, it's just that I prefer variety.

As with anywhere else in Japan, the views were spectacular.

I've only ever skii'ed in Japan and Europe so I can't speak for the whole world (obviously), but the asian mountainscape seems to be unique as far as I can tell.  They just extend forever in every direction.  Korea is the same in many regards, when flying over Korea all you can see is a sea of mountains.

This isn't the best view to show that, but it's a nice picture nonetheless.

These were taken on a phone camera, so I've not bothered to edit anything.  They seem to have come out relatively well though.

We were there during a festival period, for some reason they had this jump set up with dudes doing jumps and whatnot over it, performing tricks and whatnot.  No one managed a backflip although a couple tried it.  Ouch.

Despite the lack of backflips there were some amazing fireworks.  I'm editing the videos to make a quick compilation thing that'll be up sometime in the future, but they were unlike fireworks in England in almost every respect.  There were some enormous explosions, some triple layered fireworks (I've never seen anything explode, grow and change colour, then explode again) and a lot of really cool ground based stuff.

Trying to focus using a phone camera is a nightmare.  Who knows if any of these are going to come out.

They do a really good job of putting their fireworks to music, usually classical, (and with a short enough crappy 'pop,' music section that you don't want to leave immediately) always interesting.  They also layer their fireworks really well.

The Japanese firework game is superb - they're superb at the whole thing.

This is an example of the ground based stuff I was talking about.  They layer these in the same way as the sky based stuff.  English fireworks guys need to take a close look at the Japanese scene.

So as it was a festival, they cut a lot of little spaces like this into the snow.  Every hotel or store has their little area in front filled with mountains of snow, a great way to make a small display like this.

Another small cubby with a candle.  I wonder what the fire risk associated with this is?

The above was one of these.

A rather large hotel had a front that obviously bore the brunt of the snow clearers, but at least they get to have a fun little diplay like this out front during the season.

I tried a small steerable snow thingy for the first time.  They're pretty cool but the one I rode was incredibly slow; the runner were plastic with random flecks of metal sticking out of the runners, screws not fully placed and the worlds smallest steering wheel, none of which add up for speed or control.  If you lived in an area like this presumably you'd have your own and maintain it properly.

The festival itself was fairly low key except for the fireworks (which were dope, so to speak)  but well worth checking out if you're in the area.  We came across a couple of local kids digging in some of the displays (shown above) which was a nice little slice of life, showing how people in the area live.  Worth it!

Like Riding a Fish in a Barrel

So I went snowboarding this weekend.  It's been a while so I thought I'd spend most of the time on my backside, but it turned out alright and after about an hour I was back around where I was a couple of years ago, minus matching gloves because I forgot where I put them last time.

The weather was great, sunglasses all the way.  The snow started out nice and fluffy, but after a bajillion snowboarders spent a few hours on it and the temperature didn't stay low enough, it became a bit mushy.  When we got on the bus to leave it started raining which means the next day was probably a lot worse, but by the end of Sunday the skiing was still okay.

There are some photographs and videos to come at a later date, hopefully.

The Snow

So Tokyo has had a pathetic amount of snow recently, that is to say barely any.  Up in the mountains, however, they've had metres.  It looks like they've not had any particularly good snow this week, but last week they had a decent amount.  Maybe it's time to get the ol' snowboard out and truck around for a bit?

We'll see what the weather is like and have a go.

For the voyeuristic among you, here are the webcams for most of the Japanese resorts.

So I DID go Skiing

So I did, in the end, go skiing with dad.  There are a fair number of good photographs, but these ones are the ones which remind me of travelling around and jumping headfirst into the snow.



I have a feeling that those fresh tracks in the background might have been me or dad.


That green jacket is absolutely fantastic.  Before I tried it, I assumed that all jackets had small flaws in their design.  My current jacket is pretty damned waterproof for a ten year old skiing jacket, but the pockets are a pain in the jacksie, and the place where you put the ski passes is inconvenient.  This jacket has it all - it's waterproof to the Nth degree, it breathes really well, and it's damn near luminescent.  What more could you ask for?

I stole dads bright green jacket, so he had this much more modest number.

It's really difficult to appreciate just how mountainous Japan is, until you see it first hand.  Even looking at the interior (which is about 75% of the land in reality) on a map doesn't prepare you for the Alps style perilous drives through the mountains.  There were a few moments where I thought we might void the insurance on our little rental car, but it turned out okay.

Top tip, if you ever need to rent a car in Japan, don't use Nippon Rentacar!  They are terrible.  You aren't allowed to leave the parking area in their cars if you are a foreigner, let alone drive in rain or SHOCKED GASPS, snow.

You're much better off renting from a company vendor like Honda, which is where we got our car from.  The guys were really nice despite my incompetent Japanese, and everything went off without a hitch.  We brought the car back a day early because we forgot which day we were supposed to go back, but that gave us a chance to pick up some souvenirs.  All part of the plan!  Kind of.

The mountains aren't as dramatic as Europe (or I imagine Canada) in terms of their sheer size, but they go on forever in all directions.

Unfortunately I couldn't work out the settings on my camera to capture it, but the snow was melting/freezing constantly which led to a crystalline effect in the snow, reflecting the light in tiny diamond like spots.  It was really fascinating (for me, anyway) because I've been skiing any number of times, but this was the first time I've seen this effect so vividly displayed.  You'll have to take my word for it...